The grey squirrel’s domination of Britain’s woodland over the past 150 years has enraged everyone from gamekeepers to prime ministers. Peter Coates discovers how the ‘American tree rat’ became the furry mammal that Britons loved to hate
On 2 January 1997, readers of the Los Angeles Times woke up to news of an outbreak of hostilities between Britain and America. “British Wage War on US ‘Invaders’,” screamed the headline in LA’s leading daily.
Yet the invaders weren’t human, they were small and furry. “Imported gray squirrels, reviled as ‘tree rats’, are pushing the native red variety toward extinction,” the article continued. “In scarcely more than a century, gray squirrels, imported from America, have toppled the British red squirrels from the perch of treetop privilege they have enjoyed since the Ice Ages.”
The article, written by the paper’s London bureau chief, William Montalbano, conveyed to its American readers Britons’ love and hate relationship with the nation’s two squirrels, the red and the grey. Yet it did more than that. Montalbano took the clash between the all-conquering grey squirrel and its cuddly red cousin and turned it into a metaphor for the Ugly American: uncouth, greedy, unstoppable, super-sized and altogether unloved.
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“Overfed, oversexed and over here. Half a century ago, such good-natured grousing was aimed at American GIs who came to liberate a continent,” Montalbano wrote. “In these high tech times, it is squirrels that rouse the English angst.”
Montalbano wasn’t exaggerating: the grey squirrel had indeed been the source of fire and fury on the other side of the Atlantic. Everyone from gamekeepers to prime ministers had raged at the sight of grey squirrels turning their new British home into their own private playground.
And what made matters worse was the fact that the grey’s rapid proliferation was apparently achieved at the expense of its native red cousin, which, by 1997, was second only to the water vole as Britain’s fastest declining mammal. For decades, those standing up for the defenceless red – and confronting the grey’s other affronts against trees, crops and birds – portrayed their actions as righteous self-defence against a voracious invader. They had, in effect, declared war on the grey squirrel.
The great escape
The seeds of that war had been sown in 1876, when Thomas Unett Brocklehurst, a scion of Macclesfield’s leading silk manufacturing and banking family, brought back two pairs of eastern greys (Sciurus carolinensis) from New York back to his country seat at Henbury Park, Cheshire. According to a natural historian writing in the 1930s, Brocklehurst put the greys “in a large cage on the wall of the house, and exhibited them to his friends until, tiring of them, they were liberated into the adjacent woods”. This was, according to reliable sources, the first introduction of greys into Britain that led to a naturalised population.
Other British estate owners, both industrialists and landed gentry, shared Brocklehurst’s desire to prettify and enliven their country seats with a novelty animal. At first there was little sign of the conflict to come: the greys’ jaunty charm, brash confidence, endearing boldness, thrilling acrobatics and, yes, visual attractiveness – “prettier” than “our own red species”, according to an 1892 article – initially won over their hosts.
However, within three decades, Britain’s grey squirrels were proving too successful for their own good. The population was exploding and proving so troublesome that (according to the same natural historian) Brocklehurst’s son “gave orders to kill them”.
His efforts did little to slow their proliferation. By the interwar period, the grey had well and truly supplanted its native red cousin over much of southern England and the Midlands. And talk of warfare between the two species had become part of public discourse. Edward Max Nicholson, a future founder of the World Wildlife Fund (1961), probably made the first specific reference to “the squirrel war” in The Spectator in 1925. The Second World War, unsurprisingly, accentuated this martial discourse. Evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, recently appointed Unesco’s first director-general, brought up warring squirrels in Britain in 1946 in The New York Times when discussing whether war was “instinctive in man” (or, indeed, other species).
In the early stages of the Second World War, as global conflict exerted greater pressure on food supplies, a more unusual tactic had supplemented existing efforts to counteract greys. A year after food rationing was imposed in 1940, the Board of Education and Ministry of Food issued pamphlets such as Good Fare in War-Time. Among the recipes for sheep’s head broth and sheep’s heart pie – not to mention cuts of cow such as clod and shin – were squirrel pie and squirrel stew. And squirrel-tail soup and grilled squirrel joined stewed rook, roast starling and hedgehog pâté in They Can’t Ration These, a foraging text from 1940. In 1942, an official of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (MAF) expressed “no doubt whatsoever that grey squirrel (or for that matter any squirrels) would make excellent eating”.
Squirrel was not entirely alien to British palates. Hunting reds for squirrel pie was a “very ancient sport among the lower orders”, observed the New Forest’s deputy surveyor in 1901. Yet, as AD Middleton ruminated in his 1931 book about the grey’s spread, “for some extraordinary psychological reason… many [British] people who will readily enjoy jugged hare, and swallow oysters with gusto are positively revolted by the thought of eating a grey squirrel en casserole”.
The squirrel’s interwar reinvention as an ‘American tree rat’ exacerbated this revulsion, scuppering government attempts to put greys on plates. The most avid consumers in Second World War Britain were GIs from Appalachian states who, however overfed, still craved an authentic taste of home. The homesick GI may have been prepared to pay top dollar for an eastern grey – up to 5 shillings (around £9 in today’s money), according to Monica Shorten, who succeeded Middleton as Britain’s top sciurologist (scientist of squirrels). Yet for Britons, this market was simply too niche. “The average countryman,” a Times reporter explained in 1945, “cannot overcome a distaste for ‘squirrel pie’. He has been told that the grey squirrel is a ‘tree rat’, and would not dream of eating one.” Nonetheless, some pet owners appreciated them as an untapped reservoir of wartime dogfood.
Pest or vermin
After 1945, anti-grey forces turned to a weapon that had been deployed against species deemed pest or vermin for centuries: the bounty payment. After all, not all Britons wanting to quash burgeoning grey populations were anti-grey because they were pro-red.
They were more concerned about the economic damage greys allegedly inflicted. So, in March 1953, MAF and the Forestry Commission launched ‘bob a brush’: a bounty of a shilling per tail.
‘Bob a brush’ ramped up the battle, marking central government’s first direct intervention. The Forestry Commission headlined its press release ‘War on the Grey Squirrel’. Then, in what a reporter dubbed a “national call-to-arms”, the Treasury doubled the reward from the start of 1956.
When, in March 1958, MAFF (MAF had become MAFF, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, in April 1955) decided to terminate the bounty, “practical men” (a MAFF scientist’s term) such as gamekeepers and their allies in parliament, were outraged. They demanded reinstatement – none more vocally than Britain’s stridently pro-bounty prime minister, Harold Macmillan.
At his sizeable estate, Birch Grove in Sussex, Macmillan pursued an Edwardian country gentleman’s lifestyle – and pheasant and grouse shooters regarded greys as a serious threat to gamebird chicks. In January 1960, Macmillan fired his opening salvo in a series of exchanges with his MAFF ministers
A “personal minute” to John Hare demanded to know: “What is happening about grey squirrels?” Incentivisation, Macmillan’s experience at Birch Grove indicated, had been a roaring success. “In my part of the country,” the prime minister intoned, “we had got rid of them all, thanks to your subsidy.” Without the bonus, they were “swarming again”.
Hare’s advisers identified food availability as the critical determinant of population dynamics, not whether a bounty existed. This was the opposite of what Macmillan wanted to hear. “What are you doing about grey squirrels?” he snapped back. Hare responded: “I am afraid I have again been compelled to accept the scientists’ view.” The prime minister scribbled on Hare’s minute: “What do scientists know about squirrels?”
In the summer of 1960, Macmillan accosted Hare’s successor, Christopher Soames. Grey numbers were “getting up again”. For the PM, the bounty’s withdrawal was to blame: “What do you think?’”
A fellow country gent (and Winston Churchill’s son-in-law), Soames had no love for greys. His reply included the mollifying
“I shot two yesterday”. But, like Hare, he opposed bounty restoration. Since grey numbers in March 1958 were practically the same as when the bounty was brought in five years earlier, £81,000 of taxpayers’ money had been shelled out “to little effect”. In fact, as MAFF’s scientific advisors noted, the “unsystematic killing of a few hundred thousand grey squirrels [according to official figures, around a million tails were submitted] may do no more than help to keep the present population stable and healthy.”
Resigned to failure
This verdict silenced Macmillan until the spring of 1963, when, despite the preoccupations of sex and spy scandals such as the Profumo Affair, he contacted the Forestry Commission. He wanted to know what it intended “to do about the grey squirrels at
Birch Grove”. His intervention prompted plans for Commission and MAFF squirrel experts to confer – yet, before they met that October, Macmillan had resigned.
The prime minister’s personal war against greys underscores the clash between what he called “official” squirrel knowledge (in his view, defeatist and resigned to the grey’s occupation of every inch of British soil) and the superior “unofficial” understandings of “countryfolk”, rooted in lived experience.
Some rural residents insisted, as late as the 1970s, that greys triumphed in the war they’d started because males castrated (then slayed) their red counterparts, also devouring baby reds. Yet since Middleton’s data-driven national survey of the grey’s distribution (1930–31), sciurologists had downplayed direct forms of assault. Instead, they emphasised superior competitiveness, and diseases unrelated to greys that left red populations enfeebled. In short, references to warfare were inappropriate.
In fact, notwithstanding Montalbano’s article in the LA Times, it seems that, over the past three decades, the war against the grey squirrel has lost some of its energy. The trade journal Forestry and British Timber may once have described the grey as a “neighbour from hell”, but fewer Britons were now, it seems, inclined to agree.
Fiendish climber
Prime evidence of reputational rehabilitation – particularly among younger city-dwellers who may never have seen a red in the flesh – was the success of a Carling Black Label TV advert in 1989. The commercial showed a local grey squirrel making short work of a fiendishly difficult assault course bristling with Fort Knox-like defences – at the end of which lay a birdfeeder packed with hazelnuts. Accompanied by the soundtrack to the TV drama Mission: Impossible, and concluding with the catchphrase “I bet he drinks Carling Black Label” as the squirrel feasted triumphantly on the hazelnuts, the advert scooped awards (the Golden Break Advertising Awards, Best Performance by an Animal category, to be precise) and showcased the grey’s breathtaking agility and ingenuity.
Even some of the bird-feeding folk on the frontline of the one-sided back garden contest couldn’t help admiring their furry foe’s brazen fearlessness. For increasing numbers of Brits, it didn’t matter that the only squirrel in town was grey.
Time’s passage blurs awareness of a species’ origins. Does the grey’s success in Britain’s arboreal landscape (there are now an estimated 2.7 million in Britain, compared with just 287,000 reds) count for more than the technicality of where it came from? As the 150th anniversary of 1876 approaches, is it time to think the previously unthinkable: that the grey squirrel is a more suitable animal icon for 21st-century Britain than the seldom-seen red?
Environmental journalist Patrick Barkham posed this very question 10 years ago in BBC Wildlife magazine: “What better symbol of modern Britain than an exotic newcomer?” The brown hare or horse chestnut might fit the bill. But “one of the most successful introductions, the grey squirrel, was probably too controversial a candidate,” Barkham mused. A decade later, is it finally time to bow to the all-conquering powers of the American ‘tree rat’ and love the grey squirrel?
The red terror
The native squirrel hasn’t always been the object of Britons’ affections
In 1890, a Field magazine reader was so irritated by the phenomenon of squirrels eating “young pheasants” that he picked up a pen and composed a letter of complaint. But the squirrels he was bemoaning weren’t grey. They were red.
Long before the introduction of the grey in 1876, most rural dwellers had no time for the native squirrel, which they usually called the ‘common’ (or ‘brown’) squirrel. Sciurus vulgaris leucourus was widely viewed as a fast-breeding vermin species akin to rats, mice or rabbits – and gamekeepers, foresters and farmers hunted them accordingly.
By 1800, in northern Scotland, a combination of pest control and deforestation had driven the red squirrel to the edge of extinction. The population did mount a recovery, before being slaughtered again – this time falling victim to an association of subscription-paying estates and timber interests. In 1903, the year that Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Squirrel Nutkin first appeared, the Highland Squirrel Club began paying a bounty of 3d per tail, rising to 6d in 1940 (equiva- lent to roughly a pound today). By the time it folded in 1946, the club had overseen the killing of 102,900 squirrels.
All in all, it’s a sobering reminder that today’s universally adored red has not always benefited from such vigorous efforts to protect and revive it.
Peter Coates is emeritus professor of American and environmental history at the University of Bristol. His latest book is Squirrel Nation: Reds, Greys and the Meaning of Home (Reaktion, 2023)
This article was first published in the February 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine